End-of-life care needs a fundamental review, not just more funding

‘End-of-life care has failed to evolve in the 60 years since the opening of the first modern hospice.’ Photograph: Richard Bailey/Getty Images

Your editorial (29 October) highlights the urgent need for better funding for end-of-life care. As a physician and academic who has worked in this area for 40 years, I would like to raise three underlying issues.

First, it implies that hospices are the only model for delivering good end-of-life care. It is arguable that in Britain we have overrelied on the charitable sector. We now have NHS-funded hospital palliative care teams who can provide excellent care when patients are coming to the end of life but still needing specialist treatments – which very often hospices cannot or will not offer.